By the Light of the Moon

I was trying to photograph the waxing crescent moon and its current neighbors Venus and Jupiter last night, and was having trouble getting the moon to show as a crescent.  This is what I mean;

That's a crescent moon, just a lower sliver of it, but it looks like a fuzzy white blob.  Above it is Venus and directly beneath is Jupiter.  I played with various settings on the camera, to no avail.  I thought the problem was that it was still too light and decided to wait until later.

Here's later:

That helped a bit, but not enough.  A few dozen attempts later, I gave up trying to get a silhouette of the landscape in the photo, and zoomed in.

Better, but still not what I was looking for.  I zoomed in as far as my 36 power zoom would go, and got this:

Cool picture but I would have liked to have Venus and Jupiter in there also.  By this time, they were spreading farther apart.


Ah, well.  What a display.

I'm told that with a backyard telescope you can see Jupiter's moons.

For a colorful article about this celestial conjunction, which occurs roughly every quarter century, see this story in the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/curtain-call-for-moon-venus-and-jupiter/2012/03/26/gIQApzD4bS_blog.html

Day and Night in My Part of the World

Two months ago, late morning sunshine briefly kissed my house for the first time since mid-November.  As the weeks went by, the sun rose higher and higher from behind the mountain to the south.  Now we have several hours of sunshine before it dips behind the mountain in mid-afternoon.

Late this afternoon it emerged from behind a descending ridgeline to warm my home again.  It won't be long now and we will have sun from early morning until almost midnight.

Shining on the house,

And in the house.

Just as this welcome miracle was again disappearing behind the mountain, I pulled out of my driveway and headed for Seward.  Iron Lady was playing at the Liberty Theater, and I wanted to see Meryl Streep in the role of Margaret Thatcher, the role that won her an Oscar this year.

When I left the theater at 9:30 and started out of town, Venus and Jupiter were shining brightly above the mountains to the west.  The town of Seward nestles at the foot of those mountains, and climbs as high up their feet as it can, which really isn't very far.   Maybe far enough to avoid a tsunami, unless it's a really big one.  I stopped and took one photo.

The brightest star is Venus.  Jupiter is below and to the right, just above the mountain.

In the notch between one mountain and the next, I spotted a crescent moon.  I needed a place high enough to see the moon, dark enough for a good shot, and away from the power lines in town.  I found it on the other side of Resurrection Bay.

From the top:  Venus, Jupiter, crescent moon, Mt. Marathon and its neighbors, and the City of Seward.  Resurrection Bay is the darkness in the foreground.

In order to get that photo, I had to climb part way up a seven foot high snowbank and stab my tripod into the snow.  This is one of the photos I took of the moon as I was unintentionally sliding down that snowbank.

Okay, one more photo and them I'm off to bed.

Venus missed out in this shot because I was trying to get a decent photo of that amazing crescent moon.  Boy, I sure wish I'd had my good camera with me instead of only the point and shoot.